On Monday’s cold and rainy night, the Shakespeare Theatre Company hosted its annual performance-packed Harman Center for the Arts gala, which benefits the organization's artistic programs. The evening began at the Harman’s glass-fronted building with a two-hour show featuring reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for the gala’s “A Night in Verona” theme.
Actors from the company performed an original choreographed piece, violinist Joshua Bell played a rendition of West Side Story’s “Tonight,” and the Rennie Harris Puremovement hip-hop dance group performed its own piece, entitled "Rome and Jewels." Chita Rivera, from the original Broadway cast of West Side Story, also made an appearance and took home an award for her contribution to theater.
For the post-performance dinner, guests headed (on foot or by bus, because of the rain) to the National Building Museum, where jesters, jugglers, and hoola-hooping belly dancers from Vali Music led the way. Once inside, guests warmed up with tomato soup shooters and mini basil paninis and took in the dramatic display.
“The theme of the evening is a night in Verona, but we wanted the National Building Museum to reflect that in a much more contemporary way,” said Shakespeare Company associate director of special events Joanne Coutts. “It’s not all red velvet and ruffles.”
As a first for the gala, co-chairs Beth Dozoretz and Samia Farouki brought in New York event designer David Stark to create the concept for the second part of the evening. The result: a massive space filled with white ribbon streamers to match the white tables and dance floor.
“We were thinking of what was going on at the Building Museum as a kind of microcosm of the event, and we decided to bring in the Romeo and Juliet theme more in terms of movement and light,” Stark said. “So we suspended thousands of streamers from the ceiling in a wave formation to enhance and change the effect of the dining room.”
The display transformed the venue from cavernous to intimate, helped by hundreds of standing white votives on the long banquet tables and elsewhere. “I wanted everything to be in white so it could be a blank canvas for the dramatic lighting effects,” Stark said, noting the alternating green, purple, red, and blue light show from Atmosphere that painted the space.
Entertainment remained the focus of the performance-laden evening, with a nine-piece mariachi band and 10 flamenco dancers—all dressed in white garb—taking to the white dance floor as guests found their seats. After the feast of butternut squash and goat cheese risotto and Amish chicken with layered pumpkin and portobello mushrooms, DJ Sabo—in a glowing white booth—spun party classics by Rick James, Michael Jackson, and Madonna that got everyone on the dance floor.
